Tuesday is Constitution Day (which, I guess, is a thing) and the Freedom From Religion Foundation is celebrating with a full-page ad in today’s Bloomington Times-Herald newspaper in Indiana: [Click headline for more…] Read more
The video below, part of The Atheist Voice series, discusses how an execution was postponed in Florida so that the Attorney General could hold a fundraiser for her re-election campaign: We’d love to hear your thoughts on the project — more videos will be posted soon — and we’d also appreciate your suggestions as to which questions we ought to tackle next! Read more
The folks at College Humor have answered the question: “Is God Made Up?” And you won’t believe it: the website that mocks everything in sight found a way to mock religion… Love the line at 1:39: “Religion has had a profound, transformative effect on my life. It’s transformed my Facebook feed from boring to insufferable.” Anyway, glad we finally settled that debate. Read more
Education writer Jon Fortenbury interviewed a student who lost his faith while in the middle of his undergraduate education at a Christian college — and offers a few tips for other students who may find themselves in similar situations: 1. College students are generally friendly and accepting Even though [Justin] Mart didn’t make his non-Christian views widely known, most people he told or who found out didn’t rebuke him for it. “A lot of people were more curious than they were condemning,” said Mart, who has since finished a nuclear engineering master’s degree at Oregon State University. “I was lucky to have quality friends who didn’t judge me. Fellow Bible majors asked questions but didn’t try to convert me at all. They were largely respectful. I also spoke to professors about my views and they were all very respectful and didn’t rat me out.” [Click headline for more…] Read more
Last night, Ricky Gervais appeared on CNN’s “Piers Morgan Live” to talk about his new Netflix series “Derek” but the conversation — as it always seems to do when someone interviews Gervais — moved to religion. Fine by me, though, because Gervais got in a wonderful line about why the lack of an afterlife drives him to do even more in this life (beginning at the 2:44 mark): [Click headline for more…] Read more
The strange saga of the Scottish public school that allowed American homosexuality-denouncing evangelists to “help out,” and to give children as young as five years books like How Do You Know God Is Real? and Exposing the Myth of Evolution, has just entered a new phase: Two head teachers at a Scottish primary school who allowed members of a US creationist Christian religious sect into classrooms have been removed from their posts, it emerged last night. Headteacher Alexandra MacKenzie and her deputy Elizabeth Mockus — who job-share at Kirktonholme Primary School in East Kilbride — are to be “redeployed” to backroom duties while South Lanarkshire Council carries out an investigation. … Education chiefs want to determine why the Church of Christ sect had been allowed into the school to work as classroom assistants for the last eight years. [Click headline for more…] Read more
By now, you better have seen Every Young Man’s Battle, the Christian anti-masturbation movie. If you haven’t, the full version is right here: Dusty Smith has watched it, too. In his latest video, he takes on the role of your mind as you watched that horrible film. And it’s awesome. (Just about everything you’re about to hear is NSFW. You’ve been warned…) [Click headline for more…] Read more
As Quebec faces criticism within the province and throughout English-speaking Canada over their Christian-centric Charter of Values, the federal Bloc Quebecois has made it clear that they stand with their provincial-level counterparts by forcing a Member of Parliament out of the party. Maria Mourani, former member of the federal Bloc Quebecois, has released a statement (en français) announcing that she has broken ties with the Bloc Quebecois, having elected to quit the party altogether rather than step down from her position as a caucus member. She will continue to represent her Montreal riding of Ahuntsic as an Independent until the end of her term in 2015. [Click headline for more…] Read more
Here’s another small data point in the discussion about whether religion is good for you: Scientists have discovered that 86 per cent of water samples from holy sources contain faecal matter. Austrian researchers also found that church fonts contain high levels of bacteria and that none of the holy springs they studied could be considered safe for drinking from. [Click headline for more…] Read more
The Atlantic’s James Hamblin published a wonderful piece yesterday about the Secular Student Alliance’s Safe Zone program and why it’s necessary: Earlier this year, while no one was looking, Gage Pulliam took a photo of a plaque that listed the Ten Commandments, as it hung on the wall of his Oklahoma high school’s biology classroom. Pulliam emailed the photo, anonymously, to the Freedom From Religion Foundation. They then sent a complaint to the school district, which asked Muldrow High School to take down the plaque. … The protesters began speculating as to who was responsible for the instigating photo. Speculative whispers became cries. When some of Pulliam’s friends — who were among the cohort of openly areligious students at Muldrow High — started feeling heat, Pulliam outed himself on an atheist blog. Sacrificing himself to so that he might save others, Pulliam admitted that he was the one who sent the photo. Pulliam later said that in the wake of his confession, his mother worried for his safety. She also worried that his teachers might grade him differently. His sister, an eighth-grader, said other students wouldn’t look at her, and “in one instance she couldn’t even get a class project done because her group members refused to talk to her.” Other students “told Gage’s girlfriend that he should stay from them or else they’ll punch him.” That’s the sort of antagonism atheists can encounter in certain schools in many states. That’s what the program is designed to counter. That’s why I’m a supporter of it. [Click headline for more…] Read more
